Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

I have been curious what difference a top-rate trainer would see in training a pre-weaned baby, and training an older bird who is already weaned and fledged. If both are trained well with positive reinforcement and small increments, is there a difference in the outcome? The following is from a post by Barbara Heidenreich, used by permission from her Good Bird forum.

BH:

Flying in open fields with no perching options and relying on a “baby
bond” are in my opinion are unreliable crutches for outdoor flight
behaviors. To me it signals some important training steps are being
missed.”

Question from forum:

May I ask why “baby bond” isn’t good to BUILD a +R history with the bird?
How can you say you don’t like to hear about training fledging birds
because “it signals some important training steps are being missed”?

Barbara Heidenreich:

I am not a big fan of teaching flight on the Internet, which is why I don’t participate in those discussions anymore. Although I am still a member of a few lists and check in to read posts periodically. As you know the discussions get quite heated and getting into arguments on flight training do not accomplish much towards my teaching goals. Kinda just sucks up lots of time.

With that in mind I will share a response to your questions….but I will not be sharing all my thoughts, philosophies and teachings on flight training here. Even my two days teaching at Chris shank’s is not enough to send someone off to free fly safely in my opinion without additional guidance.

So here is the deal……
I said “relying” on those TWO strategies (open fields and baby bond) are an indication more work has to be done. I did NOT say training with postive reinforcement should be left out. Nor did I say you should not build trust, or start training early. I believe there were some assumptions made about my comments or lack of complete detail on how I train flight.

To address the easy one first…….The open field one for me stands alone. If you are flying open fields only, you have not trained a bunch of flight skills you should have before taking the bird outside. Simple as that. You wont be able to get me to argue that one further : )

On the more confusing one……What I think is missing here is a definition of a “baby bond.” To me I see that as simply the bird responds to the person that has been hand feeding it. In my definition this person typically is not actually doing any intentional training of behaviors. Only feeding the bird. Yes the bird pairs food with the person, but not necessarily performance of behavior. So perhaps it creates a relationship of sorts……but to me that is not enough. There must be training ( which it seems we are in agreement on)

Yes you can use hand feeding formula to train, as I have done with a flock of 12 unweaned scarlet macaws. But I absolutely can say those birds did not show a marked difference to the training I had done with at least 100 weaned birds (most hand raised, some parent raised) I trained for flight. In my opinion it wasn’t the “hand feeding” that made them good flyers. It was the TRAINING, whether it was associated with hand feeding formula or solid food or other reinforcers.

However given the risks of hand feeding and also my experience of it not being a requirement for good flight training, I prefer to leave that up to those much more experienced in hand feeding than I am. Wendy’s article explains it perfectly I think. She and I can both attest to the devastation when a bird is lost from a complication due to aspiration of food. It happens…even to the best hand feeders. I prefer starting with a recently weaned bird.

As far as my opinions on flying birds…keep in mind I have either been flying birds in shows or teaching about flight since 1990. That’s 18 years. I kinda dont think I need convincing of the fun and value. BUT I do believe it is not right for everyone/everybird and also that reducing risk by super good training is far more important that getting your bird flying out doors.

The entire thread in this discussion can be found on Barbara’s Good Bird Group in early June 2008.